Servers withdrawal announcement and replacement

[Staff 9972]

Hello!

We inform you that the following servers will be dismissed on November the 26th as they do not meet anymore our quality requirements in terms of line reliability and datacenter support.

Alkaid
Heze
Microscopium
Pavonis
Persei

The aforementioned servers have already been replaced by other servers in the same locations, running in datacenters which are currently offering higher reliability.

You can check the servers status and additional information on our servers monitor here:
https://airvpn.org/status

Kind regards
AirVPN Staff

[dedo299 4]

1 hour ago, Staff said:

Alkaid
Heze
Microscopium
Pavonis
Persei

The aforementioned servers have already been replaced by other servers in the same locations, running in datacenters which are currently offering higher reliability.

I don't see any replacements for Heze and Persei in the Fremont location. Aquila is the only server left. Can you clarify what you mean by "replaced"?
Thanks

I see now from your server update messages, which I hadn't looked at prior to my comment above, that these two Fremont servers have been replaced by two new Los Angeles servers. My experience is that Fremont is faster than Los Angeles for San Francisco Bay Area users. SFBay Area has a population of about 8 million, second only to Los Angeles, in California. Seems like we're being short-changed what with losing two out of three local servers. Any good reason for this? Edited ... by dedo299
To expand question

[Staff 9972]

@dedo299

Hello!

We have picked a datecenter in Los Angeles to replace two Fremont servers (quite near in terms of network distance and very near geographically). The new LA servers announcement, where we specified that they replaced servers in Fremont, is here:
 

Kind regards
 

[Amadore 4]

I hope the new Persei equivalent server runs as good as the old one. The servers in Freemont were faster and more reliable than LA, like the other person said.
Persei was always the fastest. I could to**ent and surf with no problems. 

Any plans on getting one in Oregon? Please?

[rooty0 1]

I had the best latency for Fremont, it's pretty sad that Persei and Heze are gone, my favorites

Maybe the staff will reconsider to add at least 1 server in Fremont to support Aquila? Pretty much all the Fremont users party migrated to Aquila now, will be rough

[dedo299 4]

Staff:

Following up on your explanation comment, I’ve done some speed checking using servers from different locations and my conclusion is that from my location in the SF Bay Area the two new Los Angeles servers are about 50% slower than the remaining Fremont server (Aquila). With Aquila I get about 180 to 190 Mbps down; with Teegarden and Groombridge it’s about 90 to 95 Mbps down. With no VPN I test at 209 Mpbs down and 6 Mbps up. I used Ookla’s speedtest.net for this. If you can suggest a better test site I’ll use it.

My practice has been to use servers from my three closest locations: Fremont, Los Angeles and Phoenix. The Phoenix location, with five servers, has tended to be the slowest; I only use them when Heze is down AND to connect to one of my daily go-to sites--Macintouch.com--which blocks  Persei and Aquila.  (Oddly, yesterday and today the Phoenix servers have been blazingly fast, giving me test speeds equal to Aquila  (around 190 Mbps down. I don’t know what to make of that; I’m assuming it’s an anomaly.)

My internet provider is Comcast, and because I suspect it throttles torrent connections I generally use the TCP 443 protocol. However, for the speed tests I just did I used the faster UDP 443 protocol. (One thing that puzzles me is the in all VPN test cases my upload speed was only about 2 mbps.)

You said the new Los Angeles servers are “quite near in terms of network distance and very near geographically.” I can’t comment on network distance, but I will say while LA and SF/Fremont may APPEAR to be close on a small scale map, in reality they are about 350 miles apart, as the crow flies. That’s a significant distance, even for California (similar to the distance between Rome and Marseilles, France).

I’m not trying to be argumentative but I feel AirVPN has degraded the service of all of your Bay Area subscribers by moving the two Fremont (i.e., Silicon Valley) servers to southern California. I hope you’ll reconsider.

[Staff 9972]

@dedo299

Hello and thank you for your considerations! We will evaluate them carefully.

Currently we just want to underline that Heze and Persei suffered too many partial and total outages for our standards and the frequent events caused quite a remarkable amount of complaints, and rightly so, by our customers. Keeping those servers in spite of the collected evidence and feedback would have been detrimental for the quality of our service as it's bad to have a well performing server when the datacenter, for various reasons that have been occurring again and again, can't ensure anymore a decent uptime.

We also wish to specify that Aquila, the server you mention giving you good performance, which is from a different provider, remains in Fremont: it is not one of the soon to be dismissed servers.

Kind regards
 

[dedo299 4]

I understand what you're saying: the Aquila server remains, perhaps improved, but unreliable Heze and Pesei have to go. I've experienced that unreliability when Eddie disconnects and opens another server on my list. What I'm unhappy about is that you say you're replacing these two severs, but in fact you are not. You are taking them out of service in Fremont and you are adding two new servers in Los Angeles, which is another location entirely. LA and Fremont are not nearby cities. As I and others have stated, the LA servers have always been slower that the Fremont servers. This has not changed with the two new server "replacements" for Heze and Persei. I'm not in the business so I don't know what issues you have to deal with locally in terms of server replacement/upgrades, but my point is that we AirVPN subscribers in the Bay Area once had three local servers to choose from and now we have one. As the load on Aquila increases, the speed will probably decrease. In my case, switching to an LA server means cutting speeds in half. I wish you had replaced Heze and Persei locally rather than remove them entirely. Adding two servers to LA is compensation, not replacement.

[OpenSourcerer 1435]

There is a worrying development. You seem to be shifting your entire server fleet to one single provider, M247. And the reactions are almost the same as we've seen them when most Leaseweb servers in Germany were replaced with M247 servers, which for me at least didn't work as good.
It seems like you're creating a single point of failure here, having decreasing diversity in peering and such. I hope it's not what it looks like.

[Staff 9972]

@giganerd

Things evolve and we always have replacements ready. In the USA the situation is extremely peculiar because the climate is hostile and it's hard to find datacenters which work well AND do not fear many notices on alleged copyright infringements for example. With the last replacement you mention, note that we have added a new provider.

Also note that our relation with Leaseweb, after a harsh divorce, is again very good. In Germany we have many servers with Leaseweb DE, in Singapore we have three servers with Leaseweb SG. If you compare situation with that of one and a half year ago, we don't have less providers now.

Kind regards


 

[OpenSourcerer 1435]

18 hours ago, Staff said:

In Germany we have many servers with Leaseweb DE

 

$ for i in `dig a in de.all.vpn.airdns.org +short`; do ip-api $i|grep -E 'isp|query'; done  
  "isp"          : "M247 Ltd",
  "query"        : "185.189.112.26"
  "isp"          : "Leaseweb Deutschland GmbH",
  "query"        : "178.162.209.151"
  "isp"          : "M247 Ltd",
  "query"        : "141.98.102.242"
  "isp"          : "M247 Ltd",
  "query"        : "141.98.102.234"
  "isp"          : "M247 Ltd",
  "query"        : "185.189.112.10"
  "isp"          : "M247 Ltd",
  "query"        : "141.98.102.226"
  "isp"          : "M247 Ltd",
  "query"        : "185.189.112.18"
  "isp"          : "Contabo GmbH",
  "query"        : "79.143.191.166"
  "isp"          : "Leaseweb Deutschland GmbH",
  "query"        : "178.162.204.227"
  "isp"          : "M247 Ltd",
  "query"        : "141.98.102.178"
  "isp"          : "M247 Ltd",
  "query"        : "141.98.102.186"
  "isp"          : "Leaseweb Deutschland GmbH",
  "query"        : "178.162.204.219"
  "isp"          : "Leaseweb Deutschland GmbH",
  "query"        : "178.162.204.222"
  "isp"          : "M247 Ltd",
  "query"        : "185.104.184.42"

Well, there is a fair amount of them now, wouldn't go as far as saying "many" but, granted, you've won that one. It sure looked like it the last two years.

[Szabo 3]

As a former Heze/Persei user, I understand why they were removed, but also add my voice to suggesting to AirVPN that they open at least one more server near the Bay Area (Fremont or similar). 
Los Angeles and Fremont are in the same state in the US, but they are about 400 miles apart, and that has a noticeable effect on latency. 

Perhaps one more server can be added in the same location as Aquila?  That way we have some redundancy option.    Barring that I hope there is another data center provider in Northern California (San Jose/San Francisco/Fremont/Oakland/Sacramento) that meets AirVPN's requirements.
 

[DarkWrath 1]

I too, would like to echo the above sentiments. Please add another server in the Fremont location.

Thanks!

[mikeyg76 0]

I also would like to note that the loss of the two Fremont servers almost got me not to renew this year.   I am not impressed with the new los angels servers, but I have a hard time leaving airvpn becAuse of your Reliability and secure data.  Please reconsider another northern California server as it would be greatly appreciated